Syd Barrett's childhood home — Hills Road, Cambridge

Roger Keith Barrett — who became Syd Barrett, the founding creative force of Pink Floyd — grew up in Cambridge at 6 Hills Road, in a Victorian terraced house near the city centre. His father, a pathologist, died of cancer when Syd was fifteen, a loss that shaped him profoundly and that he processed, or failed to process, over the following decades. The Hills Road house was where he learned guitar, developed the songwriting precocity that would produce 'Arnold Layne', 'See Emily Play', and the extraordinary debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and formed the friendships that led to Pink Floyd. His neighbour and school friend David Gilmour — who would eventually replace him in the band — grew up a short distance away.

Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s produced an unusual concentration of creative talent: Barrett and Gilmour were contemporaries at the Cambridge County High School for Boys. The city's combination of academic culture, relative prosperity, and the particular social freedom of the English grammar school environment seems to have been generative in ways that are difficult to fully account for. Barrett absorbed it and refracted it through a sensibility that was deeply English, deeply psychedelic, and finally, tragically, deeply ill.

The house at 6 Hills Road is a private residence on a busy Cambridge road. It attracts a steady stream of visitors making a Pink Floyd or Syd Barrett pilgrimage through Cambridge — a journey that typically includes the Hills Road house, the later address where Barrett lived in reclusion until his death in 2006, and the various Cambridge locations associated with his and the band's early lives. The city takes a complex pride in the connection: Barrett's story is one of extraordinary gifts and devastating mental illness, and the house where those gifts first emerged is a modest terrace on a road leading into town.